Using Monocular and Biocular Head Mounted Displays with Weapon-mounted Off-Bore Systems

This experiment compared the target detection and engagement performance of weapon-mounted off-bore systems using monocular and biocular head-mounted displays for infantry soldiers in urban streets, wooded terrain, and in-buildings terrain. Specifically, this trial compared the performance of soldiers using a weapon-mounted off-bore video sight in conjunction with a monocular and biocular head mounted display (HMD) to the in-service C79 optical sight. Participant performance measures included: time to detect targets, exposure to the target during target search, percentage accuracy, and target detection accuracy. Subjective measurements from questionnaire data included acceptability of the sight and HMD conditions. Subjective data were also collected from a post-experiment focus group discussion. The results of this study indicated that participants preferred a monocular HMD to a biocular HMD for use with off-bore weapon systems. There was no difference in target detection performance between the monocular and biocular displays for any of the three terrain conditions: urban streets, wooded, and in-building. The rejection of the biocular display can be traced to the participants’ loss of situation awareness when visually immersed with both eyes. Participants were able to detect targets in urban streets three times faster with the C79 optical sight, with a greater likelihood of detection, than with the off-bore video sight. In wooded and in-building terrain participants were t